What are the next steps after uploading a URDF for a custom bipedal humanoid robot?
Hey everyone,
I’ve been working on a custom small humanoid/bipedal robot project and I recently got my URDF successfully imported into simulation. The robot is roughly a 2-foot-tall humanoid with multiple DOF in the legs, and my long-term goal is to get it balancing and eventually walking using reinforcement learning / locomotion policies.
Right now I’m trying to understand what the actual pipeline looks like after the URDF stage. I see a lot of people showing robots walking in Isaac Sim / Isaac Lab, MuJoCo, etc., but I’m struggling to understand the practical next steps between:
Importing the URDF
Setting up joints/actuators properly
Adding sensors (IMU, contact sensors, cameras?)
Creating observations/actions
Training a locomotion policy
Transferring sim-to-real onto actual hardware
Some specific questions I have:
What should I focus on immediately after the URDF import?
How important is accurate mass/inertia tuning early on?
Do most people start with standing/balancing before attempting walking?
What controllers are typically used before RL (PID, PD, inverse kinematics, etc.)?
How do you structure observations/actions for bipeds?
What are common mistakes beginners make at this stage?
Any recommended tutorials/repos specifically for humanoid locomotion?
For context, I’m using serial bus servos and building the physical hardware alongside the simulation. I’m trying to learn the full process instead of just copying a demo.
I’d really appreciate any advice, roadmaps, or resources from people who’ve actually gone through this process. Thanks!